See also Wook's blog for the other half of the Quantum computing/computer graphics blogalog.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Help Me With My Summer Reading

I'm feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have thenagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields iscausing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.

So, I'm looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred mostimportant papers of the decade. It doesn't have to be an evenhundred, but I'm looking for a good summer's reading. (Given thatit's mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a listanyway, depending on where you want to place the "decade" boundary.)

I want these papers to cover *ALL* fields of computer science andengineering; I am by nature catholic in my reading.

You probably know that my current field is quantum computing, but prior tothat I did network-attached storage. The 1990s were a very creative,ambitious decade in that area; I admit I read much less there now thanI used to, but I haven't seen anything really earthshaking in storagein the last few years. (Friends still in the area will no doubtcorrect me.)

If such a list already exists, I'm happy to use it as-is, otherwiseI'm willing to manage a conversation and create such a list.

Since this list will be very broad, I want only a few "MUST READ"papers in each field. What are the new ideas in your field? If youhad a short meeting with, say, an NSF god descended from Olympus, whatideas would you cite to convince him/her that your *field* (not yourpet idea) is a vibrant field with real-world impact, worthy oflarge-scale support? What papers or ideas have changed the way youthink?

I'm even willing to go as far afield as robotics and bioinformatics,if you can convince me it's worth my time to go read. I'm alsowilling to accept old ideas that are finding new urgency;transactional memory would be a good example, virtualization another.

I will leave it to you to balance newness of idea with real-worldimpact, and to decide whether to recommend the key original paper(s)or a survey paper, if one exists already.

(I'm doing this a tad ad hoc; I really should reconcile against, say,the ACM computing curricula or a journal keyword list, but I probablywon't bother. Some may also object to the categorizations above;don't worry about it, just send me the papers/ideas you think arecritical, and we will work on the categorization and balance of thelist later.)

(Yes, the choice to limit this to the last decade is arbitrary; thereare plenty of old ideas I'm not familiar with, too -- I recently ranacross R-trees for the first time, for example -- but, generallyspeaking, I'm after ideas too new to have made it into textbooks,otherwise I'd just pick up a recent text.)

(And on these grounds let me say that I'm enjoying the revitalizedCACM, which seems to be helpful in focusing on new, important ideas,with more timely and accessible review articles than ComputingSurveys.)

A few thoughts to get started:

* The hierarchy of limits in computing technology:An outstanding synthesis of Moore's Law, Landauer's principle, etc.Dense, but well-written and worth the effort to understand. I don'tcare if the ideas are old, this one is critical.

* Network coding:Just barely makes the decade cutoff. This is the seminal paper,AFAIK, but the writing in it is poor; recommendations for an easierread gladly accepted. A highly theoretical idea that seems to begaining surprising traction in real-world systems.

* MapReduce:One of a set of very good ideas to come out of Google in the last fewyears. The right way to get to real parallel programming on verylarge datasets? Good question! The database community seems to thinknot. But having done a little MPI programming, I can assure you thatMPI is not for the masses, at least not in its current form.

* Disk MTTF:An analysis rather than idea paper, but important for anyone who doeslarge-scale systems or cares when their laptop disk is likely tofail.

@article{schroeder2007dfr, title={{Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you}}, author={Schroeder, B. and Gibson, G.A.}, journal={Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST)}, year={2007}}

That's eight papers on eleven ideas that have changed the way I thinkabout computing systems in the last few years, mostly in thenetworking area (a couple may have to get deleted to hold the finallist to 100 papers). There are many other topics, of course (chipmultiprocessors and radical new architectures such as TRIPS;hypervisors and virtualization of systems and networks is anotherold/new idea), but I'll leave them to others to promote. I've readhundreds of papers in the last decade, but I'm interested in what*you* consider important, not my own biases here. And while IP is aheavily network-oriented list and will no doubt expand on that set ofideas above, please look as far abroad as you comfortably can -- orforward on to colleagues in other areas who might be interested insuch a list.

8 Comments:

Hello Rod! I believe that one of the seminal works of the past decade in information processing is arXiv:math/0003117v1 by Peter Gacs. Since 166 pages (over 200 pages in published version) may be heavy for summer reading, I highly recommend the reader's guide (only 34 pages) by Larry Gray that was published alongside the above work.

If you read Vladimir Arnol'd's book on symplectic mechanics, then perhaps you agree with Sergei Novikov's review that it carries you to an end-point, not a beginning.

But then if you read Frenkel and Smits fine textbook on computational simulation (which is constructed upon Arnol'd's symplectic foundations), then you see that Novikov's criticism came too early ... that Arnol'd did provide a mathematical starting point for IBM's 21st century vision of molecular biology, as reviewed in our QSE Group's Spin microscopy's heritage, achievements, and prospects.

Can anyone foresee the scale of this 21st century enterprise? Well, Simon Ramo did pretty well at foreseeing the later quarter of the 20th century ... and so maybe we should all be looking into the future ourselves.

I just went through the recommendations of those "senior people", and I'm relieved to see that I've read most of the older papers. The newer ones, though, I mostly haven't, so they're exactly what I'm looking for.

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

When The popular comment layout is common, so it is easily recognized scanning to post a comment. If the comment section is in a different format, then I am going to spend more time trying to decipher what everything means.